" THIS IS THE U.S. ARMY’S interrogation school, and Staff Sgt. Giersdorf, a veteran intelligence-operative who speaks Arabic, Czech and Russian, is teaching new recruits to extract information from al Qaeda and other captive foes. The job, he tells his students, “is just a hair’s-breadth away from being an illegal specialty under the Geneva Convention.”
Interrogators —
the Pentagon renamed them “human intelligence collectors” last year — are authorized not just to lie, but to prey on a prisoner’s ethnic stereotypes, sexual urges and religious prejudices, his fear for his family’s safety, or his resentment of his fellows. They’ll do just about everything short of torture, which officials say is not taught here, to make their prisoners spill information that could save American lives.
Each year, 200 to 300 students enter the 16-week program at Fort Huachuca, an outpost in the Sonoran Desert that once housed U.S. cavalrymen pursuing Geronimo and Pancho Villa. Tallmadge Hall, a drab classroom building named for a Revolutionary War officer who spied on the Redcoats, houses 21 interrogation booths, where students practice their art as instructors watch on video monitors and grade them. "